Monday, December 29, 2014

Someone told me we should all go see The Interview as our patriotic duty.

I pointed out that Sony Pictures is a Japanese corporation run by American traitors who email each other racist "jokes" about the president of the United States.

I don't really buy the story that North Korea had anything to do with the alleged hacking. North Korea is calling for an independent investigation. The FBI accusing North Korea is just part of Obama's "pivot to Asia."

I don't know what it will do for Rogen and Franco. My guess is that relatively few Americans even know who they are. With the publicity around this movie, people will be seeing them for the first time in a movie that even their admirers admit isn't very good. They'll still have their fanbase, but many more people will dislike them. How would that affect their careers?

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, the old pilot to The Waltons, is on TV. Different seeing Patricia Neal as the mother and Edgar Bergen as Grandpa. I haven't seen it since it was first broadcast about 40 years ago.

Patricia Neal demands that 17-year-old John-Boy explain what he does in his room with the door locked. They make it pretty clear what she thinks he's doing in there. She demands to know what he has hidden under his mattress. She assumes it's some sort of 1930s pornography, but it's only his journal. He tells her what's in it---folksy stuff about Walton's Mountain. Not a sex diary.

The only other thing I remember was when the kids go to a thing where they'll get a Christmas present if they can recite a verse from the Bible. Turns out John-Boy has memorized erotic Bible verses.

It was probably closer in tone to the movie Spencer's Mountain with Henry Fonda as the father and James MacArthur as John-boy, called Clayboy in that incarnation.

I'll tell you one thing that bothered me. An episode of The Waltons where John-Boy was taking a bath with the door open, reading a book. Why would he do that? He was in the bathtub so his nakedness was shielded from view, but how did he get in and out without traumatizing the children? I know they were earthy country folk, but come on.

And there was one episode where, every time someone entered the scene, they were buttoning their clothes. I don't know what they were supposed to have been doing. I think that was the episode where one of the girls reveals that Ben goes to the bathroom behind the barn.

And then, when World War Two starts, Olivia tries to comfort a woman whose son was just killed in action by telling her that at least he won't come back from the war emotionally scarred. What was she thinking?

The only other thing that bothered me was that the narrator, who was supposed to be John-Boy as an adult, had a much deeper voice and different accent.

"The remarkably dismal quality is emblematic of the mind-set that brought the movie, and its attendant crises, into being."
-- Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

Sony has been cruelly bullied by Barack Obama into endangering the public by releasing their pro-assassination "comedy", The Interview, to theaters.

Naturally, the traitorous millionaire Zionist Seth Rogen and his internet predator "friend" James Franco are ecstatic.

Can't imagine George Clooney getting in line to see it, or special screenings in The White House for the Obama children. Clooney was one of the people "outraged" that Sony pulled the movie.

Pretty much the only people who will see this thing are the morons who would have gone to it anyway. But there could be a few rubes out there who will think they're really socking it to North Korea by seeing it. They're in for a let down.

Monday, December 22, 2014

It turns out that Sony's The Interview was a propaganda film aimed at bringing about the assassination of Kim Jong-Un and the overthrow of the North Korean government.

In the movie, the assassination plot against Kim Jong-Un is carried out so another faction of the North Korean elite can take over.

The U.S. State Department and Bruce Bennett from the RAND Corporation, wanted the assassination at the end of the movie. They believed that the movie would be leaked to North Korea and trigger "some real thinking".

Illegal copies of South Korean soap operas are popular in North Korea. Media from outside the country does make it way into the North.

The Daily Beast has unearthed several emails that reveal at least two
U.S. government officials screened a rough cut of the Kim Jong-Un
assassination comedy The Interview in late June and gave the film—including a final scene that sees the dictator’s head explode—their blessing.

The claim that the State Department played an active role in the
decision to include the film’s gruesome death scene is likely to cause
fury in Pyongyang. Emails between the Sony Entertainment CEO and a
security consultant even appear to suggest the U.S. government may
support the notion that The Interview would be useful propaganda against the North Korean regime.

...

A series of leaked emails reveal that Sony enlisted the services of
Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who
specializes in North Korea, to consult with them on The Interview.
After he saw the film, including the gruesome ending where a giant
missile hits Kim Jong-Un’s helicopter in slow-mo as Katy Perry’s
“Firework” plays, and Kim’s head catches on fire and explodes, Bennett
gave his assessment of it in a June 25 email to Lynton, just five days
after North Korea's initial threat.

...

[Bennett wrote], “In fact, when I have briefed my book on ‘preparing for the
possibility of a North Korean collapse’ [Sept 2013], I have been clear
that the assassination of Kim Jong-Un is the most likely path to a
collapse of the North Korean government. Thus while toning down the
ending may reduce the North Korean response, I believe that a story that
talks about the removal of the Kim family regime and the creation of a
new government by the North Korean people (well, at least the elites)
will start some real thinking in South Korea and, I believe, in the
North once the DVD leaks into the North (which it almost certainly
will). So from a personal perspective, I would personally prefer to
leave the ending alone.”

That same day, Lynton responded saying that a U.S. government official completely backed Bennett’s assessment of the film.

“Bruce
– Spoke to someone very senior in State (confidentially),” wrote
Lynton. “He agreed with everything you have been saying. Everything. I
will fill you in when we speak.”

The
following day, June 26, an email from Bennett to Lynton—as well as
several other forwarded emails—revealed that Robert King, U.S. special
envoy for North Korean human-rights issues, was helping to consult on
the film as well through Bennett and addressed the June 20 threat by
North Korea.

“Michael, I talked with Amb. King a few minutes ago,” wrote Bennett.
“Their office has apparently decided that this is typical North Korean
bullying, likely without follow-up, but you never know with North Korea.
Thus, he did not appear worried and clearly wanted to leave any
decisions up to Sony.”

(A spokesman for the U.S. State Department later admitted
that Daniel Russel, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and
Pacific Affairs, had a conversation with Sony executives but vaguely
denied having any direct influence on the creative direction of The Interview.)

Still, Sony executives felt nervous about not only the film, but also
the scene depicting the murder of Kim Jong-Un. An email dated June 20
from Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, sent to
Vice-Chairman of Sony Pictures Jeff Black said, “we need sonys name off
this asap everywhere,” asking to remove the name “Sony” from all of the
film’s promotional materials and package it as a Columbia Pictures
release (a subsidiary of SPE). Then, a July 9 email from Lynton to
Pascal expressed the company’s desire to not show the DPRK leader die.

“Yeah we cannot be cute here,” wrote Lynton. “What we really want is
no melting face and actually not seeing him die. A look of horror as the
fire approaches is probably what we need.”

While a tiny nation state possibly being involved in scuppering a
movie premiere by hacking and threatening a Hollywood studio by proxy
may be more novel and sensational than yet another psyop by the US
Regime Change Machine, the latter is far more important. The United
States, as part of its “Asian Pivot,” made an explicit push for
assassination and regime change in yet another foreign country under the
cover of art and commerce, and the North Korean regime and its ally
China are both now 100% aware of it. That has huge implications for
politics in the region, for US relations with those countries, for the
character and integrity of American art and media, and for the
mischievous, generally havoc-wreaking way our government is secretly
using our tax dollars.

Imagine how the U.S. and its CIA would respond if a major movie
studio anywhere in the world were to make a film centered around the
assassination of a sitting U.S. President: especially if a foreign
government was involved, pushing for just such an assassination. That
North Korea, or any state, might respond with speech-suppressing attacks
and threats is not to be excused, but it should be no surprise either.
Yet the US was more than happy to help foment a predictable crisis like
this, thereby putting its own people at risk. And it did so by
surreptitiously penetrating Hollywood to steer it toward using
“artistic” existential threats to taunt a nation-state that is such a
basket-case that it would only be dangerous to Americans if made
desperate by such existential threats. That shows what little regard our
“security force” has for our actual security, as compared to pursuing
global power politics.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

I watched this thing as a kid and thought it would be a pretty good movie if they weren't singing all the time and for no reason. Were the songs supposed to be dialog? But every time something starts to happen the movie stops dead and they start singing.

There was a time when musicals were thought to be somehow educational. So I got dragged to see Oliver! and I've had a grossly distorted picture of the work of Charles Dickens ever since.

Mark Lester, a big child star in his day who played Oliver, was reportedly tone deaf and arhythmic. Just plain couldn't sing at all. His singing was dubbed by a five-year-old girl.

Friday, December 19, 2014

Doesn't seem like a good idea for a president, but Obama has his sarong in a bunch over Sony pictures not releasing the pro-assasination "comedy", The Interview, starring and directed by traitorous Canadian millionaire Zionist Seth Rogen and grinning internet predator James Franco.

I don't know why the United States should retaliate against North Korea for allegedly "hacking" into the computers of a Japanese company. But Obama said he would retaliate. The "hackers" had caused "serious damage", Obama said, by exposing Sony executives' racism, how much they paid their stars and their hatred for Angelina Jolie.

Sony brought this on themselves. They made a movie that ends with, according to their own executive in Britain, a level of realistic violence that would have been shocking in a horror movie. Seth Rogen, who reveled in the slaughter his fellow Zionists carried out in Gaza, ends the movie with the graphic murder of Kim Jong-un. No one thought Kim might object to this?

Day of the Jackal was made well after de Gaulle died of natural causes, and the mockumentary about Bush being killed presented that as a bad thing in part because Cheney was even worse. There was a terrible B movie about American criminals who set out to murder Hitler, but that was in the middle of World War Two. I won't give it away, but Hitler was still alive at the end of The Great Dictator. I haven't seen the reportedly crappy remake, but The Manchurian Candidate is about a plot against a fictional politician, and it was an American movie about an American being killed.

Look at how upset the Catholics got over The Pope Must Die. They had to change it to The Pope Must Diet. I haven't seen it, but the Mafia wants to kill the idiot priest the cardinals accidentally elected pope. The assassination plot was the least anti-Catholic thing about it.

They're reporting that the rest of Hollywood is outraged that Sony pulled the movie, but it's also been reported that the other studios were mad at Sony for not pulling it sooner. Theaters are all multiplexes and a threat against one is a threat against all.

People are also saying that, even with the massive publicity, the only people who would go see this thing are the idiots who would have gone to it anyway. It shows how bad Hollywood has gotten. Even after a massive international terrorist operation to prevent people from seeing a movie, no one is the least bit curious about it. Everyone knows it's just more of the same crap Hollywood keeps churning out.

Does anyone regard Sony's action as a loss to cinema? George Clooney was outraged----was he actually planning to see it? Was Obama going to take his daughters to it? He says he "loves" Seth Rogen. He didn't say how he felt about would-be statutory rapist James Franco.

The good thing about this is that it'll probably cost Sony hundreds of millions of dollars and will damage the careers of a number of executives. My sincere hope is that it will end the careers of Seth Rogen and James Franco, but I'm not holding my breath.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Well, really, now, if you make a movie where the "heroes" assassinate the actual leader of any country, you're going to have some special problems.

Remember when they made The Pope Must Die and had to retitle it The Pope Must Diet? And that was about a fictional pope who was an idiot.

Now Seth Rogen and James Franco, each of whom I hate for various reasons, made a movie where they're going to try to murder the leader of North Korea.

To quote the New York Post quoting Gawker quoting a hacked Sony email:

“James Franco proves once again that irritation is his strong suit
which is a shame because the character could have been appealing and
funny out of his hands,” Sony Pictures UK executive Peter Taylor wrote
to his colleague in an email obtained by Gawker.

Taylor goes on to call the film, which centers around the
assassination of North Korea’s dictator, a “misfire,” saying it is
“unfunny and repetitive [with] a level of realistic violence that would
be shocking in a horror movie.”

So Rogen and Franco have cancelled all press appearances after some new threats against the thing.

I won't be going to it. May watch it on Netflix if it's on there for instant viewing.

Poor Sony Pictures. They're stuck with this thing. Can't pull it now. In any situation, you should always give yourself a way out.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

I was having dinner with extended family. My sister claimed that George W. Bush's dog didn't like him. She thought this was proof that he was a bad man. Like you needed that as proof.

I pointed out that Hitler's dog, Blondi, got along fine with der fuhrer. In fact, Hitler killed Blondi. He tried out the cyanide capsule on him before committing suicide. Blondi didn't suspect a thing. Dogs are poor judges of character. He was as oblivious as the Goebbels children were as their parents prepared to murder them in the bunker.

Blondi and one of the Goebbels children. Both

died of acute cyanide poisoning in 1945.

Most of the people at the table were shocked that Hitler would do such a thing.

I mentioned that other Nazis in the bunker were more upset about Blondi than they were about Eva Braun's death.

I had a conversation a couple of years later with the same people. They seemed to have forgotten everything I told them. My sister mentioned the Pope "excommunicating" the Mafia (he didn't really.) I said that Mussolini had completely crushed the Mafia, then the U.S. invaded Italy and put all the mafia scum into power.

She was surprised that Mussolini did something good.

"Mussolini had his points," I said ironically. I hadn't praised Mussolini---I condemned the U.S. for putting the Mafia in power. They wanted to install a non-Fascist right-wing government, but the opponents of Mussolini had all been Socialists and Communists.

But my sister asked if Hitler had any good points.

"Well, he killed himself," I said. "He took cyanide AND shot himself."

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Am I wrong to be utterly indifferent to the alleged attempted "rape" of Shia LaBeouf?

I didn't really understand it. She was whipping his legs and nobody noticed?

I'm not blaming the victim here, but the guy DOES go around starting fights like an idiot. He attacked his neighbor with a knife. You can watch video of him hopping around like a boxer trying to fight with some guy on the street. He was physically helpless all of a sudden? If he had been the victim of some other crime, like if the woman had come in and started whipping his legs and then DIDN'T attempt to rape him, I don't think it would unreasonable to suggest that he should have called for help. If someone had come in and stolen his keys and his credit cards you'd expect him to say something.

And, also, after all that crap, after the plagiarism and the repeated fake "apologies"---he ripped off an artist and paid a skywriter to do a fake apology, but wouldn't simply pay the person whose work he stole. All this was going on. He was scum. Starting fights in bars, disrupting plays. And you just knew he was going to get away with it. Nothing would ever happen to him. He would continue living a charmed life, raking in millions. How are we supposed to feel about this?

Saturday, December 6, 2014

A beret is the poor man's toupe and a beard is the poor man's face lift. Look at Ronald Reagan whose neck aged faster than the rest of him. A beard could have taken twenty years off. At 80, he could have passed for a hopelessly senile 60-year-old. Hair dye didn't do him any favors. Horrible, repellent old man.

But it turns out that you don't need a full beard anymore. Stubble is enough to do the trick and a lot of people think it looks better. A full beard can make you look like an old prospector, and I'm suspicious of people with neatly trimmed facial hair of any kind.

Both the Swedish and British versions of Wallander have aging stars with a lot of stubble. Makes me wonder if Swedish police don't have a dress code. But the guys do look better this way. My guess is that face lifts are less common among European stars and this is a safe, affordable alternative.

I've said this before, but Paul McCartney should take a page from Ringo Starr's book and grow some sort of beard. The only trouble is that Sir Paul dyes his hair and he'd probably have to dye his beard, too, but I'm sure there are ways to deal with this. I somehow doubt that's Ringo's natural hair color.

It's only good if you have something to cover up, though. It looks so stupid on some people.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Dr Susan Block has a theory of what Bill Cosby's problem is. He has a sleep fetish.

As a sex therapist in private practice, I’ve treated
many clients with sleep fetishes of various kinds. The clinical term is
“somnophilia,” a paraphilia in which sexual arousal arises from fondling
or having sex with someone who is asleep or unconscious. A more
romantic name for it is the “Sleeping Beauty” syndrome. The fairy tale
fantasy of an exquisitely beautiful, utterly helpless princess in a
deep, hypnotic, erotic sleep that only awakens, with the climactic kiss
of a charming prince, has captured imaginations and titillated libidos
for centuries of civilized human history. If Prince Charming had given
Beauty a roofie and then done his kissing and maybe a little fondling,
he’d be a nonconsensual sleep fetishist, a.k.a., a sleep rapist. Not so
charming any more.

Block noted that one of Cosby's alleged victims was already sleeping with him and he STILL drugged her. It's a dangerous fetish when it involves drugging people. As Dr Block writes:

The other side of the sleep fetish, getting sexually
aroused by having sex with slumbering lovers, is far more dangerous to
others than to the fetishist, especially when it involves putting
“lovers” to sleep without their consent and then using their knocked
out, very vulnerable, rag-doll body to satisfy desires for absolute
power, selfish sensation and an intoxicating feeling of total control.
If the allegations are true, this appears to describe the sexual
appetites and behaviors of Bill Cosby.

There's an Australian sex movie about this, by the way, called Sleeping Beauty, available on Netflix.